CSGGE Affiliate Lunch Talk | Muslim Woman and Architectural Patronage by D. Fairchild Ruggles
- Event Type
- Lecture
- Sponsor
- Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity
- Location
- 306 Coble Hall and virtual via Zoom
- Date
- Feb 6, 2026 12:00 pm
- Speaker
- Dr. D. Fairchild Ruggles, Professor and Debra L. Mitchell Chair in Landscape Architecture
- Cost
- free and open to the public
- Registration
- Registration
- Contact
- Anita Kaiser
- csggeatillinois@illinois.edu
- Views
- 27
- Originating Calendar
- Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity
Please join us and CSGGE faculty affiliate D. Fairchild Ruggles who will present her lecture "Muslim Woman and Architectural Patronage" at 12pm CST on Friday, February 6, 2026. Please note this lecture will be hybrid - you can either attend in person at Coble Hall room 306 or via Zoom (a link will be emailed to you after registration).
Description: Women have been important patrons of major works of architecture in the Islamic world historically, a phenomenon that reveals their social agency and can illuminate their lives even when they are barely mentioned in historical texts. They were almost all empowered by wealth and proximity to powerful men. But coming from different social and ethnic backgrounds, some of them high born, others emerging from enslavement, their reasons for patronage differed.
About the Speaker: An historian of Islamic art and architecture, Dr. Ruggles’ research examines the medieval landscape of Islamic Spain and South Asia and the complex interrelationship of Islamic culture with Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism and the precise ways that religion and culture are often conflated in the study of these. She is the author of two award-winning books on gardens: Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain (2000), and Islamic Gardens and Landscapes (2008). Additionally she has edited or co-edited numerous works, including Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies (2000), the award-winning Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision (2007), Cultural Heritage and Human Rights (2007), Intangible Heritage Embodied (2009), On Location (2012), and Islamic Art and Visual Culture: An Anthology of Sources (2011). Her recent book Tree of Pearls: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of the 13th-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen Shajar al-Durr (2020) won the Nancy Lapp Popular Book Award from the American Schools of Oriental Research. Her latest publication is Islamicate Environments: Water, Land, Plants, and Society (2025).